DROPPED OBJECT
A Christmas story from Britain's Roswell: the Rendlesham Forest UFO legend
‘What the hell is it?… Who is in charge?’
These were the questions that Airman 1st class Kurt Loutzenheiser asked US Air Force Security Police when he was confronted with a landed object deep inside Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England
It was a pitch black night and the NATO complex, that included USAF-controlled RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, separated by the forest, was closed for the Christmas holidays.
The 21-year-old from Arizona was part of a ‘skeleton crew’ of USAF personnel guarding RAF Bentwaters where nuclear weapons were secretly stored in bunkers at the height of the Cold War.
Loutzenheiser, who left the USAF as Master Sergeant, was based at Bentwaters from 1980-81 and Woodbridge from 1981-83. During his time there he worked alongside personnel from the USAF’s 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron. They had a ‘boilerplate’ of an Apollo Command Module on display, of which I will say more later.
During Christmas 1980 the 67th were not involved in any exercises. But he says he was called out on two or more occasions during a two-day period to drive a transport to the scene of an unspecified ‘incident’ deep in the woods.
He believes this is the source of what later became known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO legend, often described as Britain’s answer to the Roswell incident.
But whereas other USAF personnel have talked about time-travellers, ‘non human intelligences’ and alien visitors who were interested in the contents of the bunkers at Bentwaters, Loutzenheiser’s story is refreshingly matter-of-fact.
He says quite candidly: ‘I don’t know what I saw’.
Gary Heseltine, a retired British Transport police officer, collected 17 different timed events that he says took place over a week-long period that began on Boxing Day, 26 December 1980.
‘Those events included at least two crafts landing, UFOs of several shapes and sizes being observed, entities being seen on at least three occasions, a laser type beam being directed along the entire length of the RAF Bentwaters storage area,’ he told me.
In stark contrast, Loutzenheiser says he was told the object he saw on the forest floor was ‘a dropped object’ and, four decades later, he feels sure it was either an aircraft or part of an aircraft.
On the first occasion, in the early hours of a dark December morning, he was ordered to drive a military truck that followed a convoy of Special Police units out of RAF Bentwaters.
It was dark and the convoy drove into the pine forest, passing the turn-off to the East Gate at RAF Woodbridge, into an area that he knew was British territory.
‘We drove through trees to a small clearing,’ he told me. ‘It was the first time I had been outside the base [RAF Bentwaters] into the forest’.
There he saw an object on the ground. He would not describe it in detail but says it was the size of tank.
‘I got within 50 yards of it and there were some lights; white and blue lights. But I don’t think they had anything to do with the object,’ he said.
His team installed portable light-alls and heaters in the clearing around the ‘object’. This was cordoned off and at one point a flat-bed truck visited the scene.
He returned early the next morning, in daylight. There he saw, in addition to base security police, at least two British police officers who were walking around the object in the clearing. He was told they were from the Ministry of Defence and had their own transport.
Afterwards he was ordered not to discuss the incident and signed a non-disclosure agreement.
‘I was told that I did not see it and I should keep my mouth shut.
‘I took a decision not to talk about it and chose many years ago to avoid mentioning it to anyone for obvious reasons,’ he told me.
When searching online for old friends from the base he came across my Rendlesham page, ‘New Light on Rendlesham’. After reading other accounts he says he found this ‘the most objective and least critical of the “key players” involved.’
‘I find the willingness of the public to accept the most ridiculous and constantly evolving stories amusing,’ he told me.
After serving at the Twin Base complex for three years he moved to RAF Mildenhall where he stayed until 1989 when the Cold War ended.
‘It was not a cover-up, just mis-direction,’ he said, referring to the Rendlesham incident. ‘Everything that has come out since then has been just to send people off in the wrong direction.
‘Whatever it was that happened, the base leadership would have been told about it immediately, as would the British MoD, as they were on site between six and eight hours after the incident began’.
So what does he believe happened?
‘I don’t know what it was,’ Loutzenheiser said. ‘But I did not see a UFO. This was something of conventional origin.
‘The most likely explanation is that something fell off a plane and they wanted to find it before someone else did.’
He speculates that Britain’s Roswell originated in a military blunder, perhaps involving an accident or aircraft malfunction. It’s location in the forest, outside the base perimeter, posed a headache for both countries.
Loutzenheiser says he was told by Security Police that it was not ‘a broken arrow’ and there was no radiation hazard. In USAF parlance broken arrow refers to an accident that involves nuclear weapons, warheads or components that does not create a risk of nuclear war.
Earlier that year a Damascus Titan ICBM exploded after liquid fuel leaked from its silo in Arkansas. On that occasion news of the accident leaked out immediately and President Jimmy Carter went on TV news to reassure the public there had been no leak of radioactive materials and the situation was under control.
What do I make of Loutzenheiser’s story?
Is it yet another red herring, as in the stories about SAS pranksters that I exposed as an April Fool’s prank in 2018?
Without any supporting evidence, such as a diary entry, it is just another story in the ever-evolving legend that has spawned 20 books, dozens of documentaries and several TV films.
Well, Loutzenheiser’s account has similarities with those of two other young US airmen, Larry Warren and Adrian Bustinza. Warren, who was just 19 at the time, claims he was also driven, as part of a military convoy, into the forest late at night and had his rifle confiscated. On entering a clearing, he saw Security Police milling around and a glowing misty object shaped like a huge aspirin sitting in a clearing.
Then a basket-ball shaped light fell from the sky, followed by a flash of light that illuminated what he described as ‘a machine, object or craft’, triangle or delta-shaped, that was sitting on the ground.
Warren’s story has been widely disputed by the others involved and his account has been disowned by Peter Robbins, with whom he co-authored a book, Left at East Gate. But it forms the centrepiece of a long-awaited documentary film, Capel Green, and he goes much further with elaborate descriptions of ‘non-human’ creatures that allegedly emerged from the landed UFO. These beings communicated with senior officers, including someone he believes was the Twin Base’s US Wing Commander, Gordon Williams.
In the film Warren claims the alien contact was filmed by US security police and it appeared the commanders were expecting it. He also mentions the presence of British police officers at the scene along with Lt Col Charles Halt, whose memo to the Ministry of Defence sparked off the whole furore when it was published by The News of the World on 2 October 1983.
Warren was quoted in the 1983 story under the pseudonym Art Wallace. At that stage he was the first alleged military eyewitness to the events in the forest to speak on the record. But rumours of a UFO landing and contact between USAF officials and aliens, who had been repairing their craft, had been circulating in UFOlogy since early in the new year of 1981.
In the News of the World, 2 October 1983, Warren is quoted as saying that afterwards ‘We were all called to the base security office at Bentwaters and told what we had seen had been classified top secret. We were made to sign official USAF documents saying we understood that if we talked we could be punished…one guy added that if we did talk, bullets were cheap’….
Both Halt and the base commander, Col Ted Conrad, have poured cold water on Warren’s stories. The former denies that Warren was present during his own extended sojourn into Rendlesham Forest during which he and other USAF personnel witnessed their own dramatic UFO sighting on the night of 28/29 December.
But Halt has muddied the waters himself, accusing both the US and UK governments of having ‘subverted the significance’ of the Rendlesham incident via the ‘use of well-practiced methods of disinformation’.
For his part, Brigadier General Williams has said nothing since 2003 when he told the makers of a documentary for the Science Fiction Channel the whole thing was ‘a flight of fancy’.
In 2010 and again in 2016 during a visit to East Anglia, Halt’s boss, the Base Commander Col Ted Conrad, told me he was bemused by the whole bandwagon and its promoters
Conrad said the UFO stories had grown and become more elaborate each year, to the extent that they resembled the plot for a science fiction novel.
Who or what to believe? As Mark Twain wrote in Huckleberry Finn: You pays your money and takes your choice.
But what could be so embarrassing that it had to be covered up with an elaborate UFO story?
And if there was a cover-up, why were so many people involved? If you wish to keep something secret, the less people who know about it the better.
One possibility is that Loutzenheiser is describing a genuine event of some kind, possibly a joint exercise with US and UK forces, in another time frame.
His account of the dropped object raises another ‘red herring’ that has occasionally surfaced as another possible explanation for the Rendlesham incident.
Until at least 1983 a large metal ‘boilerplate’ replica of an Apollo module was on display at RAF Woodbridge, outside home of the 67th ARRS. This can be seen in the official USAF photograph reproduced below:
As mentioned earlier, the 67th’s primary role was the rescue of aircrew who had either crashed or ejected either in friendly territory or behind enemy lines. They were equipped with HH53 ‘Jolly Green Giant’ helicopters and C-130 Hercules transports.
The squadron had a a secondary task: locating and recovering US space hardware, including Skylab, the Space Shuttle (from 1981) and possibly even the remains of Soviet rockets and satellites that NASA and other more secret US agencies wished to examine. According to one version of the legend sent to me in 2017:
‘During the Christmas week of 1980 RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters (the sister base to Woodbridge and only a couple of miles away) were on low alert with the Woodbridge control tower un-manned and the Bentwaters tower only with a ‘duty’ crew on board. There was no flying from both bases during that week. On the 25th of December 1980 (Christmas Day) the 67th ARRS decided to let off steam and pull a practical joke on the Security Police and Law Enforcement officers at the close by RAF Bentwaters, the sister base to RAF Woodbridge. The 67th ARRS were big practical jokers as were many other units in the USAF.
‘The plan was to carry the BP [Apollo boilerplate] under a HH-53 Jolly Green Giant helicopter and drop in on the flight line of the Bentwaters base. The idea being that the Bentwaters SP/LE would think a real Apollo capsule had come down on the base complete with 3 ARRS crew members dressed in HAZMAT suits as Apollo 'crew'.
‘Late in the evening on the 25th/26th, the HH-35 headed east across the Woodbridge flightline with the capsule underneath on the winch cable. However everything did not go to plan. As they approached the end of the runway, they clipped the approach landing lights causing the BP to swing. This in turn made the helicopter unstable and the crew had to drop the BP into the nearby Rendlesham forest (off base and onto official UK territory).
‘After the HH-35 had dropped the capsule, the Bentwaters SPs were alerted to some strange lights and goings on it the woods. The young Security police reported encountering strange lights and a strange conical shaped UFO in the woods - thus the famous Rendlesham forest UFO case was born. BP-1206 was what caused the whole thing.’
The Apollo boilerplate story has gained so much traction that it appears in an online history of the 67th ARRS as the true explanation for the Rendlesham incident. In another online forum, where the capsule is discussed, a former member of the squadron claims ‘following the Rendlesham UFO incident it [the boilerplate] was moved away from its site in front of the 67th hanger to a secluded spot out of the view of the public’.
This rumour was resurrected in 2017 in a story published by the Daily Express after a photograph of the boilerplate on display at Patrick AFB in Florida was shown at a UFO convention. This tabloid story was published in the same month that Kurt Loutzenheiser originally contacted me with his account.
Another coincidence?
Sadly, although it might initially sound plausible, the Apollo capsule ‘theory’ is false, much like the SAS prank. The contact who told the Apollo story claimed that 99% of the base personnel were unaware of the presence of the Apollo boilerplate at RAF Woodbridge.
That is nonsense, says Kurt Loutzenheiser:
‘Everyone I knew stationed there knew about the boilerplate. The 67th had one for training, which was NOT the same size as an Apollo capsule - it only needed to be approximately the same weight so was solid metal. As you drove up to the 67th squadron there was one in their "front yard" and was also solid steel.
‘Nobody in their right mind is going to believe a US Super Jolly helicopter took off from Woodbridge (without permission) as a practical joke or that it flew over the base unnoticed regardless of the time. It also would have had to fly directly over the security police at the East Gate unnoticed.
‘I have heard part of this story a long time ago and I think it originated with someone from the 67th trying to take credit for a great practical joke that never happened. From what I remember the 67th had no crew on the base, they had some people on alert only to be called in if necessary.’
So another invented story about the Rendlesham Forest UFOs bites the dust. How long before another takes its place?
But what was that ‘dropped object’ that Kurt Loutzenheiser saw in Rendlesham Forest?
In November, Dr Jon Kosloski the Director of the US government’s Aerial Anomaly Resolution Office told a Press roundtable that AARO plans to release the results of its analysis of some ‘interesting historical UFO incidents’ in volume 2 of its Historical Report. Kosloski said the second part will address a number of old cases they have resolved, including claims of alleged UFO sightings near nuclear facilities and ICBM silos.
Will the RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge incidents be among them?
This is excellent, thank you, I crave more. I wonder, have you read Gary Heseltine's 17 different timed events?
Hi David. Great article. But wasn't Halts night 27/28? You've got 28/29 here.